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This is the official blog of Northern Arizona slam poet Christopher Fox Graham. Begun in 2002, and transferred to blogspot in 2006, FoxTheBlog has recorded more than 423,000 hits since 2009. This blog cover's Graham's poetry, the Arizona poetry slam community and offers tips for slam poets from sources around the Internet. Read CFG's full biography here. Looking for just that one poem? You know the one ... click here to find it.

Friday, August 26, 2011

"Rhetoric," by nodalone

"Rhetoric," by nodalone aka Shaun Srivastava, second round poem in the Sedona Poetry Slam on Saturday, July 30, 2011.

Rhetoric

By nodalone

Photo courtesy of Tara Graeber

nodalone

It’s three grand a plate
At a private estate
For a two-hour conservative ladies’ luncheon
For new up-and-comers
That reads
“Plus one” on the invitation
It’s stepping up and carving out your own pound of flesh
It’s cheeky bumper stickers in succession until they’re finally convinced
It’s a little black cocktail dress with stilettos and fishnets
Its sephora war paint skepticism
It’s a bastardized and perpetually rewritten religion
It’s a brand of polyamorous submission so private
They don’t even let God listen in
It’s warmed over and well-dressed aggression
It’s xenophobic
Head in the sand
Ass up ostrich resentment
It’s a black president
It’s young male Muslims in a Lexus
It’s your own
Gas guzzling
However thinly veiled distorted American reflection
In a roadside rest stop mirror
8
Playing kabuki theater with inarticulate
And confederate fears
It’s letting you think
That this time around
You’re actually gonna get a chance to steer
It’s blank checks made payable to national ignorance
It’s one dollar scratch-off lottery fingertips
It’s working class subdivision cul-de-sac competition
Its midday, Midtown Manhattan
And the living ghost off a broke Annie Leibovitz
Muttering to herself
“what the hell just happened?”
It’s every last fanatic in Westboro, Kansas
Googling Ayn Rand
Pistol gripping the fading light of white male protestant privilege
It’s the latest
Rabid
Cable news hit list
It’s Clear Channels’ 24-hour commitment to bearing false witness
It’s buy the ticket
Spin the wheel insanity
It’s cardboard cutout Christianity
Meets David Copperfield kind of clarity
Parroting
Permanent marker restroom crucifix comparisons
Swearing it’s the end of days
Praying your FaceBook
Crosshair topography conjures
Dueling Pennsylvania Avenue hand cannon
Constitutional revolution
It’s no longer innuendo
When your district representative
Has a handful of bullet holes through their front window
Yet when said rhetoric gets manifested in northwest Tucson
At about 10 a.m. on the second Saturday in January
Politics turns to puddles of platelets
In a department store parking lot
reflecting the irony of a red sign reading
“Safeway”
Within hours Jared Loughner was stuffed
Into a little metal coffin labeled
“deranged lone gunman”
Who had a hard-on for one Arizona congresswoman
It’s clearly not an act of terror
There’s no evidence to suggest
That her extended magazine trephining
Was in any way
Politically motivated
Nor a function of a certain contemporary
Brand of Republican rhetoric
Let’s not even dare postulate
As to the young man’s leanings
And ideologies
No, see
She’s just the latest
In a long
exhausting
seemingly continuous list
of victimized innocence
at the hands of some suburban kid’s
empty existential crisis
consigning patriotism for racism
at a gun show at three-fifths the price
despite
recycled arguments and incessant
Second Amendment references
their rhetoric remains infectious
as it falls on the ears of clear
and cloudy minds alike
but in this country
the difference between a sick kid
and a terrorist
is that one of those guys is white.

CFG the slam poet

Fox the Poet

Christopher Fox Grahamis a Montana-born boy raised in Arizona to be a poet, artist, and singer with unending wanderlust. He's fascinated with art and other shiny things, a good story will keep him captivated and silent as he soaks you in.

In truth, he is good at only three things: using language, kissing, and driving.

He has performed for MTV and on The Travel Channel's "Your Travel Guide" episode of Sedona. Aside from winning more than 100 poetry slams, he's published four books of poetry, most recently The Opposite of Camouflage, and won the 2012 Dylan Thomas Award for Excellence in the Written and Spoken Word.

A slam poet since 2001, he currently hosts the bimonthly Sedona Poetry Slam in West Sedona.

For nearly four years, he was the senior Copy Editor of the Sedona Red Rock News, and an arts reporter and a columnist. He wrote a weekly column "Sedona Underground," about the city's art scene. After leaving in May 2008, he was asked to return as Assistant Managing Editor in October 2009. He was promoted to News Editor in April 2012 and in August 2012 was promoted to Managing Editor, overseeing the Sedona Red Rock News,The Camp Verde Journal, Cottonwood Journal Extra, The Scene and The Village View.

He has won numerous personal and editorial newsroom awards from the Arizona Newspapers Association, including three awards for Best Headline.

He was the managing editor of Kudos, a weekly arts and entertainment publication of the Verde Independent. He was also managing editor of The Villager, a weekly news publication in the Village of Oak Creek.

He is one the six coordinators of GumptionFest a kickass, annual, one-day grassroots arts festival held in Sedona, this year in September. More than 100 artists and bands exhibit their work for free to more than 1,200 people.

In 2005, he founded the Sedona Poetry Open Mic, which he hosted biweekly at Java Love Cafe on second and fourth Tuesdays until 2012. A former venue included Random Acts of Coffee, in Sedona, which closed in June 2005. The venue named a drink after him which one can order an various coffeehouses in Sedona. The "Topher": A large soy chai with two (or three) shots of espresso. Serve iced or hot. He was member of the city of Sedona Child and Youth Commission for two years and chairman for another two years before the commission was dissolved in 2008.

He has been unofficially named "The Voice of the Underground," in Sedona for his column "Sedona Underground" that appeared every Friday in The Scene. for more than three years, featuring more than 150 artists.

He won the 2004 NORAZ Poets Grand Slam, the 2005 Arizona All-Star Poetry Slam, and was a member of the 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2010, 2012 and 2013 Flagstaff National Poetry Slam Teams. He was also a National Poetry Slam bout manager in 2003, venue manager in 2011, and Sedona Slammaster in 2012, 2013 and 2014, sponsoring the city's first three Sedona National Poetry Slam Teams.

He believes that all slam poets are Jedis.

He has been thrown out of six movie theaters, 18 bars, a Las Vegas nightclub with his girlfriend, a public pool, two malls, four golf courses, one bowling alley, five dorms, one airport, one pet store, a now-defunct nonprofit poetry organization ... and Canada. Seriously.